Volume 07, Chapter 03 | January 2020

Image by Charles Dana Gibson / British Library

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2020. We made it! Today is simultaneously the end of an era and a new beginning and it feels like the perfect time to reflect on some of the amazing achievements of Visual Verse and of our writer community.

Visual Verse, first published in November 2013, is now in its seventh volume. We have published over 6700 pieces of original writing in 75 monthly issues. We have featured established writers like Ali Smith, Niven Govinden and Chika Unigwe; exciting contemporary voices including Amrou Al-Khadi, Irenosen Okojie, Paul Ewen, Eley Williams, Carmen Marcus and Enda Walsh and up-and-coming writers like Nisha Ramayya, Elieen McNulty Holmes, Ashley Hickson-Lovence and Sarvat Hasin whose work deserves to be read. We have also featured writers like Rishi Dastidar, Susanna Crossman and Angela Young, who are among a stable of Visual Verse contributors consistently producing work we hugely admire. Alongside our leads we have published you: more than 2500 individual writers from every corner of the globe. Thanks to you, Visual Verse is truly a living, breathing literary organism.

We are equally proud of our curatorial record, with 75 carefully selected image prompts from individual artists like Daniel Frost, Penny Byrne, Marc Schlossman, Hernan Bas and Hannah Coulson; world-class galleries and organisations like NASA, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Bodleian Libraries and M Leuven and partners like Creative Review who published a selection of Visual Verse writers in print. Visual Verse continues to thrive thanks to the energy, creativity and generosity of our writers, readers, artists and partners. Thank you all for an incredible few years.

So let’s begin the year with a visual prompt so bold that it sets the tone for owning 2020. The image is by Charles Dana Gibson courtesy of the British Library archive.

To inspire you even more, we have three powerful lead writers all breaking new ground with their cross-genre work. We are inordinately proud and excited to start the year with a piece by Mary Jean Chan (http://www.maryjeanchan.com/) , a London-based poet, editor and critic from Hong Kong. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and current guest co-editor of The Poetry Review for Spring 2020. In 2019, Mary Jean was named as one of Jackie Kay’s 10 Best BAME writers in the UK as a part of the British Council’s and the National Centre for Writing’s International Literature Showcase. She came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem twice. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019 and won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2018. Her debut collection, Flèche, is published by Faber & Faber and is currently shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award. Fingers crossed she wins!

On page two, it’s an honour to publish Noo Saro-Wiwa (https://www.noosarowiwa.com) who was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria was named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012, and selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It has been translated into French and Italian, and in 2016 it won the Albatros Literature Prize in Italy. Noo has also written book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine, New York Times and City AM, among others.

And, we gave our final page to a writer we have published regularly over our 6 years and three months in the game! With only 48 hours notice, our page 3 lead is by Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, Susanna Crossman (https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/) . She is the winner of the 2019 LoveReading Very Short Story Award and has recent/upcoming work in Neue Rundschau, (2019) S. Fischer (translated into German) alongside John Berger and Anne Carson, We’ll Never Have Paris, Repeater Books (2019), Trauma, Dodo Ink (2020), Berfrois, The Creative Review, 3:AM Journal, The Lonely Crowd, Litro and more… She was nominated for Best of The Net (2018) for her non-fiction essays, her fiction has been short-listed for awards such as the Bristol Prize and Glimmertrain. Susanna just completed her debut novel, Dark Island and is represented by Craig Literary, NY. When she’s not writing, she works internationally as a clinical arts-therapist and lecturer.

What more could you ask for? Now that the holiday season is coming to an end, it’s time to sharpen your pencils, dear writers… The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy New Year!

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 06, Chapter 10 | August 2019

Image by Jakob Owens

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to August. In a time of great weirdness – in the climate, in politics and all of the rest – this is the month to stretch beyond the borders of language and reality towards some other future. And here it is – we bestow upon you this little piggy, along with a bumper summer selection of writing from the finest poets, fictionists and translators we could gather.

Our wonderful, surreal image prompt is brought to you by photographer and filmmaker Jakob Owens, who you can follow on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jakobowens/?hl=en) .

This month’s writing lifts off with a wonderful piece by Michael Donkor (https://twitter.com/MichaelDonkor) , who studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and now teaches English Literature to secondary school students. The Observer named him as one of 2018’s best debut authors for his first novel Hold (4th Estate) and this year he was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.

On page 2 we feature Lucie McKnight Hardy (https://twitter.com/LMcKnightHardy) who grew up in West Wales and is a Welsh speaker. Her work has featured, or is forthcoming, in various places online and in print, including The Lonely Crowd, The Shadow Booth, Best British Short Stories 2019, and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. Her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition 2017 and longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award 2018 and is published this July by Dead Ink Books (https://deadinkbooks.com/) .

Next up, we are delighted to bring you Jess Thayil (https://twitter.com/JessThayil) , whose poems have featured in Magma Poetry, The Stinging Fly, Ink Sweat And Tears, Black Bough Poetry, AbstractMagazineTV, Potomac Review and Whale Road Review. She’s also engaged in self-taught abstract and mixed media art practice.

On page 4, we’re thrilled to welcome writer and translator Lucy Jones, who is British born and has lived in Berlin since 1998. Lucy studied German, film and applied linguistics and did several jobs before becoming a translator, including freelance fashion photography. Returning to her roots in literature, in 2008 she founded Transfiction (http://www.transfiction.eu/about-us/) , a collective of translators in Berlin. She also hosts a reading event called The Fiction Canteen (https://fictioncanteen.blog/) for writers and translators in Berlin.

And finally we have Durre Shawar (http://durreshahwar.com) , a writer, editor, and co-founder of ‘Where I’m Coming From’, an open mic event that platforms underrepresented writers in Wales (next event is on August 13 (https://www.facebook.com/whereimcomingfrom/) ). Durre has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class (Dead Ink Books), We Shall Fight Until We Win (404 Ink), Cheval 10 – Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award (Parthian Books). Her work explores themes of identity, intersectionality and mental health. Durre has worked and written for National Theatre Wales, British Council, Metro, National Museum Cardiff and Wales Arts Review. She is a regular speaker and performer at events and festivals and was part of the Hay Festival Writers at Work scheme, as well as BBC Writersroom Wales.

So, dear readers if you’re feeling political, personal, hungry or like swimming in a sandy-bottomed sea, we hope you enjoy our amazing lead selection. May it inspire you to get writing now. You know the rules: 50-500 words, one hour. Subs close on 15 August.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@MichaelDonkor (https://twitter.com/MichaelDonkor)
@LMcKnightHardy (https://twitter.com/LMcKnightHardy)
@BacktoJones (https://twitter.com/BacktoJones)
@JessThayil (https://twitter.com/JessThayil)
@Durre_Shahwar (https://twitter.com/Durre_Shahwar)

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